Were you a Prodigy subscriber? You can help rebuild the service

If you were online before the Internet was opened to the masses, you may remember that Chron.com – the site you’re enjoying now – began its life on an online service called Prodigy. It was, in the late 1980s and through the late 1990s, one of the big three services that included CompuServe and America Online.

Prodigy’s decline began about that same time, and by 1999 it was decommissioned, ostensibly because of Y2K issues. But as an article in The Atlantic indicates, that wasn’t really the truth. Writer Benj Edwards explores the shutdown of Prodigy and reveals a collaborative effort to resurrect it.

Fifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.

“Honestly, I wasn’t a huge fan of Prodigy,” says Carpenter, a 38-year-old freelance programmer based in Massachusetts, recalling his time on the service around the turn of the 1990s. “I had already been using the Internet for a couple of years and Prodigy seemed so closed in. But I still used Prodigy every single day. It was the graphics.”

Most of what was on Prodigy – its graphics files, message boards, games, news, etc. – is mostly lost. But Carpenter thinks crowdsourcing may be able to restore a significant portion of it.

It turns out that, if you have an old computer sitting around from that era and were a Prodigy subscriber, you may have a little piece of Prodigy’s content on that PC. The service saved content on users’ hard drives in two files, STAGE.DAT and CACHE.DAT. If Carpenter can get enough people to send him these files, he may be able to piece together big chunks of Prodigy.

To do so, Carpenter needs more data, and he’s turning to the Internet for help.

“I need everything in people’s old C:\PRODIGY directory,” he says. “The whole thing zipped up, because a STAGE.DAT is meant to work with a specific version of a Reception System. The objects within it may use features only found in certain versions of the RS.”

If you were a Prodigy subscriber, do you have an old hard drive from that era? If it’s got the STAGE.DAT file on it, Carpenter would like to see it. Email the file to author Benj Edwards and he’ll forward it to Carpenter.